Bending glass requires heat, the right tools and patience. We bend glass in kilns, at temperatures between 1100°F and 1200°F. (That’s much cooler than the temps potters use to fire clay.) We work with a custom-designed gas kiln and four large electric ones.

Another important tool is a good mold. Unless flat glass relaxes just the right way, into a mold of just the right size and shape, the bent piece won’t fit where it’s supposed to go. For bent lamp panels, we make molds from a customer’s intact original, or use a mold from our “library” of thousands. For larger projects we may need to have a steel mold fabricated to our specifications.

We have a great collection of steel molds right at our fingertips. In the 1980s, we purchased the remaining contents of the Morgan Glass Bending Studio of Brooklyn, NY, which was being sold after a century in business. We drove home with 5 tons of molds for just about any glass bending application you can imagine.